Here’s an old topic worth revisiting not only for the benefit of those of you who have entered the Hall since early 2009, but to see if any of the thread’s original respondents have since learned the cool instrument they never got around to learning. Can even older dogs learn new tricks?
This post initially appeared 1/21/09.
What instrument have you owned but still not learned how to play, no matter how cool you know it would be to play said instrument?
The year my wife and I lived in Hungary I saw some folk bands with guys playing a Hungarian version of a bagpipe. One of these bagpipe players also wore a really cool hat. I’ve loved bagpipes since I was about 10, when my Dad took me to see some Scottish marching band at the Spectrum. I had no interest in buying a kilt from the concession stands after the show, but I recall crying over the fact that my Dad wouldn’t buy me a set of bagpipes that day. I got that they were expensive, but this was 1973 or so, long before Internet shopping. If I didn’t make a trip to Scotland, I thought, I might never have another opportunity like this to buy a set of bagpipes. Waaahhhhhh!
Anyhow, 20 years later, I spent that entire year in Hungary on the lookout for Hungarian bagpipes, which used a real animal skin bag, complete with the animal’s wirey coat intact! I was sure I’d come home with a set of those bad boys, but I couldn’t find them in any of the music stores in Budapest. One of my musician friends said they were rural folk instruments, that no one wanted them in a big city. I would have had to go to some distant region, he said, to track one down. Whenever we got to one of these distant regions I kept looking for a Hungarian bagpipe, but no dice. Bulgarians had similar bagpipes, but the long day I spent walking the streets of Sofia, eating excellent food from street vendors and admiring that city’s spectacular women, I could not satisfy my one true goal: finding a set of bagpipes.
In our final week there I did find the next best thing on my list of Hungarian Things I Was Willing to Spend a Relatively Good Deal of Money to Acquire: one of those black, sheep’s wool hats, like the one Charles Mingus wears on Black Saint and Sinner Man. If I’d only found the bagpipes as well I would have been as happening as the guy whose picture I’ve used to kick off this post.
We spent the final month of our year in Hungary using a Eurail pass to go west across Europe. Our final stop was in Barcelona. There we stayed with an American friend. I couldn’t get the bagpipes off my mind. Time was running out (this was still a couple of years before the ease of Internet shopping would have made the purchase of any kind of bagpipes a breeze). The bagpipes came up in conversation and my friend said, “I’ll take you to a music store that may have something along the lines of what you’re looking for. I know there’s a type of snake charmer horn that I see folk musicians playing.”
The store had all kinds of cool folk instruments, but no bagpipes. They did, however, have the wooden snake charmer reed instrument that my friend told me about. I’m a sucker for anything in that reedy snake charmer family, so I snagged it! You can see the type of horn I bought in the picture above, the second from the left. The website where I found this thing identifies is as a Gaita chanter. It sounds amazing. Every couple of months – for the last 15 years – I’ve picked that thing up, wet the reed, and blown into it. I suddenly feel just weeks of practice away from making the squealing noises I love so much on late-60s jazz albums – was it Dewey Redman who played some kind of snake charmer horn – and early Pere Ubu albums. Just weeks of practice from being able to handle the instrument enough to use it on one of my own recordings. But I never follow through. My cheeks quickly hurt from the effort it takes to blow. I’ve never played a horn of any sort since recorder in third grade. I don’t make the time to figure out what the notes are when I finger different series of holes. It’s lame, but I’ve got this near-dream instrument sitting in my house for the last 15 years and I’ve never learned how to play it!
Wanna hear what it would sound like if I took some time to learn how to play it?
Nice! I had a thing for bagpipes for awhile, but never got a chanter to start on. apparently that’s really the only piece you need as a beginner.
I bought a melodica about 10 years ago at a white elephant sale. Like five bucks. It remains in a closet, in a prominent spot should I ever need to grab it in an emergency, waiting for me to be weeks away from cutting loose on some wailing dub solos.
I have my dad’s bassoon, and I pull it out every once in a while to see if I can make a decent noise on it. I can’t — that instrument is completely incomprehensible. I have his banjo, too, and occasionally think I should learn how to play *that* properly, instead of tuning it to standard guitar tuning and just going “whang-a-lang-a-lang” banjo stylee.
My life is a string of unachieved ambitions.
I bought a mandolin in Italy, learned to play three chords and then threw in the towel.
My wife and I couldn’t find a mantle for our living room so we bought a piano. I’m still optimistic that I will be able to teach myself some on the piano eventually but realistically it’s not going to happen for a long time.
I’ve been playing the guitar for about 25 years now and I still can’t do that thing that Richard Lloyd does at the end of the solo in See No Evil.
“I have his banjo, too”
What’s the difference between a banjo and a vacuum cleaner?
The location of the dirtbag
Thank you!
My bandmate seems to aquire a lot of different instruments. We procede to set them up in the studio and make for an impressive picture. Most recently he picked up a vintage Wurlitzer organ. It’s no Hammond, but he claims that we can use it somewhere.
One of the things he’s aquired was a pedal steel guitar. With visions of Michael Nesmith and The Byrds dancing in our heads, we set it up, tuned it, and plugged it in. We couldn’t play a note. We’ve since put the thing back into the case where it sits to this day. It’s a beautiful instrument wasting space, just waiting for someone to come along and learn to play it.
TB
I have one of my Grandfather’s open backed banjos. I have some chord charts and if pressed could plunk on it to add some “banjo twang” on a home recording or something…but it is mostly kept in the closet for sentimental reasons. My “Pappy” was an excellent bluegrass picker.
For a drummer I have a lot of guitars in the house…like 10 or more if you count the cool old Harmony Tenor, a Tenor Uke, Lap Steel, Bass etc.
We also have my great grandmother’s old Wurlitzer upright piano. My wife can play that but I can’t…
I can sort of play the mandolin but I was just thinking about returning it to the woman I “bought” it from and saying “Since I’ve only given you a third of the price we agreed on, can we just call that two years’ rental?”
I dug it, but I got my first electric guitar six months later and it gets all my skinny-string spare time. Of course, I managed to break the mandolin, so I have to get it fixed first.
My girlfriend has two saxophones that I’m totally welcome to haul down off the shelf and learn how to play, but I haven’t. I don’t know whether that counts.
And I just inherited a keyboard from my aunt, so when it gets here in a couple more weeks there’ll be another instrument I won’t play.
These tales of unlearned instruments that you know would be really cool to learn how to play are helping me deal with my own feelings of inadequacy and dashed dreams. Keep ’em coming!
Three months ago I would have said mandolin, but I’ve actually taken the time to figure out the 7-8 chords I need to play along with just about any song that you would want to have a mandolin on. (five of them are on Losing My Religion – F,G,C,D,Am)
MIDI Keyboard is the one collecting dust. Got it Christmas 2008 to go woth my Cubase set-up. Cubase was easy and I have recorded several records at my home studio. The MIDI thing is just too non-musical for me, plus the latency is still bad (computer’s fault) so it makes me play slow. I know what it CAN do, but I am just a caveman… I’d rather hit a pillow with a drumstick than write a drum loop, record it and then have to cut and paste into a drum track.
That reminds me, the instrument I have owned but still not learned how to play is pillow.
my sister bought an expensive moog theremin that sits in my room, pretty much never played. she says she’ll take the time to learn, but hasn’t quite yet. I can play bass, guitar and piano, so i’m not in too much of a hurry to learn another instrument, though mandolin, banjo and violin would be nice to learn.
not quite the same thing, but:
earlier in the decade, i bought an autoharp for 9 bucks at a flea market. the body is in great shape and all the hammers work as far as i can tell. but it needs re-stringing badly, and i don’t have the proper wrench with which to tune it. i have allowed these last two factors alone to daunt me completely, which is pretty pathetic considering that it wouldn’t be that hard to play, and could add some nice texture to my recordings.
i also own a synth that a nerdy art history friend was giving up and i have yet to even begin explore its untapped sonic potential (except for figuring out that I could mimic the sound of crickets chirping, and a juiced up hammond organ if i put it through a ‘rat’ pedal with the ‘church organ’ setting on, and my fender twin’s built in tremolo setting put just right).
i, too, have owned a mandolin (8 stringer, handmade, from italy) that gathers dust on a shelf.
latelydavid, how much you want for that pedal steel? this thread has inspired me to acquire more instruments and not learn how to play them.
I picked up a $5 recorder with visions (wait; what’s the auditory equivalent of visions?) of playing “Ruby Tuesday” in my head. That was about fifteen unlearned years ago
aloha
LD